Low Dark Current High Gain InAs Quantum Dot Avalanche Photodiodes Monolithically Grown on Si
Baile Chen, Yating Wan, Zhiyang Xie, Jian Huang, Ningtao Zhang, Chen Shang, Justin Norman, Qiang Li, Yeyu Tong, Kei May Lau, A. C. Gossard, John E. Bowers
Abstract
Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) on Si operating at optical communication wavelength band are crucial for the Si-based transceiver application. In this paper, we report the first O-band InAs quantum dot (QD) waveguide APDs monolithically grown on Si with a low dark current of 0.1 nA at unit gain and a responsivity of 0.234 A/W at 1.310 μm at unit gain (−5 V). In the linear gain mode, the APDs have a maximum gain of 198 and show a clear eye diagram up to 8 Gbit/s. These QD-based APDs enjoy the benefit of sharing the same epitaxial layers and processing flow as QD lasers, which could potentially facilitate the integration with laser sources on a Si platform.